Ring it up

Leave it to Ohio to continue to apply 20th-century regulations to an industry that has moved well beyond the last century. Members of the Ohio House should recognize that the rules that governed traditional telephone companies when they held a stranglehold on the market are no longer valid and should move forward with updated regulations that would be in line with the competitive and changed nature of the telecommunications industry.
The state Senate already has approved a piece of legislation, Senate Bill 162, that would modernize Ohio's outdated telecom rules. However, the House has been dragging its feet on a parallel bill, House Bill 276, and is causing proposed reforms to languish unnecessarily.
It's hard to justify the hang-up. It isn't as though traditional landline phone companies enjoy a monopoly over phone service any longer, at least in most parts of the state.
Just look around. Cable companies aggressively have been pushing phone service and many people have opted for no home phone at all because of their cell phones. As a result, the number of landlines served by incumbent phone companies has plunged by nearly half over the last decade, to 4 million in 2008 from 7 million in 2001.
Most of the Ohio regulations with which traditional phone companies must comply don't apply to their cable and wireless rivals. So, why saddle a group of companies that is losing market share by the basketful with rules that don't vex their competitors?
It's not that any one rule is particularly onerous. However, the regulations in total are a lot like the old union work rules that used to bedevil steelmakers at their mills. The hoops a company must jump through to avoid violating them can create an unwelcoming atmosphere for doing business — and Ohio surely doesn't need to discourage telecom companies from investing in the state.
After all, a company such as AT&T, which operates traditional phone companies in 22 states, can pick and choose where it makes its investments. It plans to spend at least $18 billion on hard wire and wireless capital investments this year. Passage of modern telecom regulations wouldn't hurt Ohio's chances for snagging its fair share of that money and more investment down the road, says Tom Pelto, president of AT&T Ohio.
We might be skeptical of this legislation if there was strong opposition to it from either labor or business interests. However, the Communications Workers of America and the Ohio Chamber of Commerce both have voiced support for passage of the telecom bill. Indeed, the chamber's vice president of government affairs, Lisa Woggon, wrote to House Speaker Armond Budish that the legislation “is so important to our state that the Ohio Chamber has designated the floor vote on the bills as a key vote that will be reflected in our legislative voting record.”
Ms. Woggon's letter was written in late January. It's now March. The House needs to answer the call and to get the reform measure going so that Ohio telecom rules no longer are a throwback to a bygone era.